Matthias Felleisen

Trustee Professor

Matthias Felleisen
  • Programming languages
  • Software engineering
  • PhD in Computer Science, Indiana University
  • MS, The University of Arizona
  • BS in Industrial Engineering, Universität Karlsruhe — Germany

Matthias Felleisen is a trustee professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

Felleisen has spent 30 years exploring programming languages and the pedagogy of software development. For the first decade of his career, he developed a new theoretical framework for modeling programming languages. Over time, this framework has provided the most widely used technique for proving type soundness theorems, the fundamental correctness claims for programming languages.

In 1995, Felleisen launched two related projects: a K-12 outreach project with the goal of synthesizing mathematics and programming education, plus the Racket language design project in support of the outreach project. He and his team taught dozens of intensive five-day teacher training workshops over 20 years, focusing on program design as systematic problem solving. Working with Northeastern undergraduates, they created the Bootstrap curriculum for middle schools; the curriculum was adopted by code.org. The team’s Racket programming language became a test bed for language design ideas. The language is used in many applications, from Department of Defense software to Naughty Dog’s games.

For his research on programming languages, Felleisen was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2006 and received ACM SIGPLAN’s Achievement Award in 2012. His paper on contracts for higher-order languages was picked as the most influential ICFP 2002 publication, and he has delivered keynote addresses at many programming language conferences. For his educational outreach, ACM honored Felleisen with the Karl V. Karlstrom Award in 2010. ACM SIGCSE named him Outstanding Educator of the Year in 2011. In conjunction with the latter, he delivered the keynote at the annual Symposium on Computer Science Education.

  • Is Sound Gradual Typing Dead?

    Citation: Asumu Takikawa, Daniel Feltey, Ben Greenman, Max S. New, Jan Vitek, Matthias Felleisen. "Is Sound Gradual Typing Dead?". POPL ‘16 Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). 456-468, 2016. DOI: 10.1145/2837614.2837630

  • Super 8 Languages for Making Movies

    Citation: Andersen L, Chang S, Felleisen M. Super 8 languages for making movies (functional pearl). Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2017 Aug 29;1(ICFP):1-29. DOI: 10.1145/3110274

  • Feature-Specific Profiling

    Citation: Leif Andersen, Vincent St-Amour, Jan Vitek, and Matthias Felleisen. 2018. Feature-Specific Profiling. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 41, 1, Article 4 (March 2019), 34 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3275519

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  • Ben Greenman